Empire
by Summer Laura
Summary: Total AU - The enigmatic House and his brother James rule supreme over their corner of stately England. Second only to the great Lord Rowan Chase could his bastard son Robert, ostracised and excluded, be the key to House's power? H/C, C/C, W/A, please R/R
1. Chapter 1

Title – Empire

Pairing – House/Chase, Chase/Cameron

Rating – M

Disclaimer – Not mine

Summary – Total AU. In a time of social status, of battles for power, of 'turf wars' in the most gentlemanly of ways, Lord Gregory House and his brother James rule supreme over their little corner of stately England. Second only to the great Lord Rowan Chase, could the outcast bastard son of their great rival hold the key to their own domination?

_Warning – mention of past cruelty this will indeed be slash, unlike my other story which will forever remain friend to friend…_

_I understand AU is not most people's cup of tea but I felt if I posted it I'd at least free up some space on my desktop_…

* * *

One can never replicate one's father...

Lord House is not a man of honour as one might expect living beneath his family name. Whilst his paternal grandfather built this family up from the ground and his own father, indeed, polished it from sand into diamonds, the third generation is no more noble that the commoner that tends it's land; that keeps it in the manner it had grown accustomed.

Gregory House is a man of great charisma, his brother James a man of great kindness - but they cannot hold a flame to those that went before.

(*)

This is their kingdom and within these walls and fields they are as powerful as the almighty God that governs over them from above.

They inherited the land and the title from their late father who died but months ago. His parting words to his sons were not words of love but words of responsibility.

To Gregory he spoke at great length.

"It is down to you and your brother to carry on the family name. It is up to you both to ensure the respect this family has garnered remains intact. The house is mine to give, as is the land. The respect is yours to earn."

That was not his father's to give. In life, neither was his affection.

The house, his pride and joy and the centre of his very possessive-orientated world, sits on acres of land owned by the House family, one of many such estates that dot around this country and other empires as far away as Spain and Italy, Belgium, Austria. Its elegant and luxuriant, though its eldest Lord is known for his distinct lack of both qualities.

House does not personify this place…

The other families see Lord House as an indulgent man prone to erratic behaviour and souring addictions. Some say he sniffs the ether, others that he awakens to a glass of wine that never falls dry.

Some say he takes lovers of both male and female; that he indulges his servants in ways he should not. The man himself prides himself on these rumours, feels they make him brighter, more interesting than the next.

His servants would describe him as an odd employer, his brother James a kindly one. None of them could ever claim to 'know' the man, forever a bachelor, a strange collector of waifs and strays that he pulls along on strings until he tires of them.

It's Thursday December 13th and, through snowy fields, he arrives home with more than just a felled Fir tree with which to decorate the grand hall for festivities. The carriage approaches from the North entrance, a route lined with tall iron lanterns and ornate sculptures. The horses, black and beautiful, grind to a halt beside the intricate fountain, a gift from an uncle as a way of expressing his 'love' and to commemorate the passing of his beloved elder brother.

The path is crystalline. Beautiful. It's painted by the enchantment of Winter.

Lord James watches from the upstairs window as his brother's latest 'toy' is taken from the carriage and wrapped in a blanket to ward off the chill. The figure stumbles, falls to his knees yet his brother makes no move to assist.

James sighs, grateful only that Gregory is not a man of cruelty who would kick a servant when he was down.

Far be it for him to judge, however.

He steps away from the window and sits in the large leather seat from which he writes his manuscripts, tales of medical mischief and darkness and plague.

James would've liked to have been a doctor if he hadn't been drafted to be a House.

(*)

Curiosity is peaked whenever a new acquisition is brought to work within these foundations. Those that last longest bond tightly, a family away from family, of sorts. They each room together, breathing each other's air, living within each other's pockets.

When one of them leaves, either for 'the other side' or for places elsewhere, they each feel the loss as a physical ache like the loss of a limb, the amputation of a thought or emotion.

"Take your shoes off," Lord Gregory demands. "I don't want your muddy paw prints all over the floor."

Silently, the young man complies.

Allison watches from her place on the stairs. Her eyes are red, hidden beneath long lashes. Her soul is dark, tempered only by obedience and servitude. She remains saddened and broken by the death of her loved one, her Joseph, angered that he be replaced just days after his passing. Her lips are still warm from his, her mind still enveloped in the memory of his last breaths, taken with her arms wrapped around him.

Poor Joseph, her 'husband' in all but the law.

Still, her tears clean these stairs as readily as the polish does. Lord House has not even waited for Joseph's bed to turn cold, for the ground he lies beneath to settle with ice and snow.

She scrubs the wood so hard the brush becomes flat and distorted, so hard that she can no longer see her face in the stairs but her very soul. It bleeds with love for Joseph, with hatred towards the man that sought so carelessly to replace him.

She looks down through the bannister rails, looks at the fresh young man with his velvet coat and his ribboned golden hair. Spoiled, she assumes, a fallen aristocrat that deserves no better than a life of servitude. She heard he was disowned by his illegitimate father, forced into work to avoid the family shame of an extra-marital affair.

Rowan Chase could never explain why his boy-servant was the very image of him; why the boy was nursed by a woman in his household who never had relations or even had contact with a man other than her 'master'.

Allison looks him carefully through her veiled eyes. His hands look too clean to have ever known true work, his face too handsome and she wonders if the Lord has taken a lover rather than a servant. His behaviour is oft strange and this would not surprise her after all. So many pretty men have entered and exited his life together with so many pretty women.

No pattern is in place, no rule set in stone.

"Remember this hallway; that staircase. The servants wing is up there," she hears House call out, confirming at least that this young man will not be bedding with him. "I'm sure they will permit you to rest your pretty head on the floor if there's room."

He teases. His words, though false, do not move the boy to disappointment.

Allison thinks he looks way too calm, bordering on arrogance. She doesn't like it one bit, not one, and as the new servant's eyes look up to meet hers she makes a visible, obvious effort to look away.

His face, she sees, is a vision.

In the periphery of her own vision, however, she notes only the marks that ruin it.

(*)

The boy is a strange one, James thinks, an odd choice even for his brother.

As a settling in ploy he has been given the ultimate honour of dining at the masters' table. He eats slowly, indifferently, his blue eyes looking only at the table before him. He has learned to play the game, has learned that sustenance can be taken from him as readily as it is given.

"Is the soup to your taste?" the younger man asks, his warm brown eyes casting watchful glances over Gregory's new charge.

The boy, Robert, has learned that to express desire is not within his rights, what little of them he has, and so he eats, drinks yet holds his silence.

House watches intently, takes in the physical form of his cast-off. He finds it difficult to believe this young creature was banished from his former court and home for bad behaviour yet there is something 'off' about him. He wonders if the bruises on his wrists have something to do with his perceived 'wrong', the ones he fights to

hide; whether the healing cut beneath his eye is remnant of being backhanded by a strong and powerful man wearing the ring of his family.

There is a lot to read. It seems, however, that the boy does not want to be read.

House leans forward. He places a hand on Robert's arm. He watches the jaw clench as he struggles not to react.

"I offer you food and fine wine, Robert, and yet you say nothing. Did Lord Rowan maim you or did he simply steal your wits? Has he bottled your voice or your tongue?"

The servant lets his spoon drop into the bowl of broth he has been afforded. When permitted, he places his hands slowly in his lap as if waiting for something.

"Open your mouth."

James clears his throat. Under his breath, he speaks his brother's name.

Don't push him, he is saying. Leave him be.

The young man hesitates, jaw clamped, eyes fixed to the ground. His hair, tied back in a navy ribbon, falls loose from it's bindings just as he becomes entangled in his own. The other servants are ruddy and urchin, dark haired, dark skinned. James thinks this one looks as if he should have been born to privilege yet here he is, owned and exchanged for money and favour.

Lord House grasps his jaw without force yet those blue eyes close tightly.

Still, he makes no sound.

"Open your mouth," House repeats. "I'll have to be rid of you if he's maimed you. You are of no use if you cannot answer me back. There is no amusement in permanent silence."

The servant looks up, resistant, defiant, and he parts those full lips with such contempt it can almost be tasted.

There, in that space between his jaws, is a fully intact tongue.

"So, you're a mute. Is this a birth state or a chosen one? Do you not speak because you cannot or because you will not?"

There is no forthcoming answer to his question. There is only the joy of the puzzle.

"Leave him be, Gregory," James insists and this time his brother complies.

(*)

"So, you are the man to replace our fallen brother?"

The man, Eric, has skin as dark as soot and midnight. Robert Chase has never looked upon a man of colour before, his life as sheltered as it was monotonous.

He stands in the doorway waiting to be invited inside.

"You don't have to stand there like a frightened cat. Come inside. We don't bite."

The voice is far from welcoming but the eyes hold no malice. Robert slowly crosses the threshold into what will be his sleeping quarters for as long as he is forced to remain.

He knows not to run in the winter, his fragile human body ill equipped to deal with the harshness of snow and ice and for now, at least, there is a warm log on the fire and a warm bed in which to sleep.

He recognises the woman from the staircase and she is as mute toward him as he is toward all else. He doesn't smile in her direction, nor does he smile for the black man.

He places his small bag of possessions on the bed beside him and claims this space as his own.

The woman looks agitated, the man something else entirely. Robert remains as he always remains. Neutral. Silent. Cold as stone.

"Do you speak to the spirits?" the black man asks. "It seems you don't speak to the living."

Robert says nothing, but when the man speaks again it leaves him feeling chilled to the bone, as if he walks the outdoors with his feet bare and his body stripped to nothing.

"You'd do well to speak to the Holy Ghost tonight, dear boy. A man died in that very spot barely days ago."

If the newcomer is moved by these words then Eric does not see it.

Allison sees nothing but her own grief, her own pain at the fact that a newcomer need be here at all.

(*)

"He's coltish, Gregory. Even by your impure standards, a banished servant with a history of absconding is a little extreme."

Gregory washes his hands in the warm water of the basin, reaching for a towel warmed by the wood-burning fire.

"Has he any skills?"

"I hear he's very good with his hands."

"Eric is good with his hands. Joseph was good in the fields as well as in the hunt. Can he fell a deer? Can he plough land?"

Gregory smiles.

"Doubtful."

"Then, what?"

"What? What, you ask? What are you doing with Miss Amber when all the world and its sister knows she is a menace? What are you doing here with me when our father left you properties abroad in which to excel? You always did say you wanted to travel, James, to see the world with your beautiful lady friend."

"This is about you. This is about you bringing yet another man in disrepute into our household. You're garnering yourself a reputation as being flippant as to whom you allow past the threshold."

Young James, always the worrier, always too preoccupied by the gossip mongering; by the naming and shaming of those that do not conform.

"I chose him because he's beautiful. I chose him because he pleases my eyes."

"Oh, dear Lord…"

"Oh hush, dear brother. I chose him because the great Rowan Chase sought to cast him from his whimsical, exclusive, perfect little Kingdom when everybody whose anybody knows he's his son."

He smiles.

"You of all people should know, Wilson, that a young man's hatred toward his father can grow into something substantial."

He uses his brother's middle name so as to draw him to attention.

"I'm sure all of Rowan's infidelities, his crimes and his passions, could serve us well in the future. Whoever could put his faith in a man that beds another behind the back of his ailing wife? What of a man who will submit his own flesh and blood to a lifetime of obligation and cruelty when he's heir to his very estate? I'm sure those that favour him might think otherwise if we could expose some of his lies and falsities and who better to do that than his banished, beautiful child?"

Who better to bring down an Empire than the scorned son of its 'Emperor'?

"It's cruelty, Gregory. It's absurd."

Gregory's hand curls behind his brother's neck and he pushes together, forehead to forehead.

"Father never could overturn that man and his people. Our family was forever second best. Maybe you and I can take the step he never could."

James sighs. His brother's schemes are never victim-less and this young man is victim enough, denied his right, demoralised and dejected from the moment of his birth.

"You want to use this angry, downtrodden boy against his father?"

Gregory shrugs, forever careless, forever one-track minded.

"What other use for a silent miscreant?"


	2. Chapter 2

_A second brief installment. Thank you to those that chose to leave me kind words. It does help the word flow when people actually care enough to comment 3_

**Part 2**

They call her Miss Cameron when they call her anything at all. She comes from a long line of workers - mother, grandmother, aunts and great aunts.

Her mother died in childbirth with her sister Rebecca, a waif of a child who never reached her third birthday. She was a job, a chore, a difficult task, the young one, and her aunt Beatrice would often suffer the burden of coughs and sickness and wailing when there was only need for silence.

For a long while Allison resented the child yet she tends her grave as a ritual now that she is gone. In life, the little girl was difficult..

In death she is simply the epitome of a Victorian tragedy.

Miss Cameron rarely sees her relatives. They are scattered over houses and stately manors where their skilled hands are required. A worker's life is often solitary with only a rare letter or note to act as a substitute for love, for affection. Miss Cameron loves her Lord, her master, curses the Gods for bringing her into this world under the guise of lower class so that they may never be together as she and Joseph were. She is an aristocrat in all but name and as a young child she had overstepped her social standing and taught herself to read. Her aunt Beatrice has her Lady write for her, beautiful, scrawling letters that look like nothing more than swirls and patterns but Allison pens her own words.

Allison wanted more.

Tonight she sits at her sparse table, a candle to light the page upon which she writes and her words are those of love lost twice over, one by name and one by death.

Gregory. Joseph.

She scrawls deep and lyrical words by which to purge her weary soul knowing that, once done, she will burn the page by the flame of this very candle. Eric calls it witchcraft yet Allison will insist upon the cathartic nature of this very ritual.

Tonight she feels but one person watching. Eric is away chopping firewood in the yard and the cooks are preparing late supper for the Lords. The snow is coming, can be felt in the air, and soon they will be isolated by that blanket of white. Priority is warmth. Comfort.

For the new employee, it seems, it is rest.

Old William is sleeping in the private quarters he earned through years of loyalty so Allison is left alone with Lord Rowan's bastard.

The bastard watches.

"I don't know what you're looking at," she says as those blue eyes, hidden by the shadow of night, fall upon her. She feels him watching as if his eyes touch her, a physical presence that transcends the space between them.

He says nothing.

Somehow, the very act of his ignorance angers her to the point of reaction.

"You have no right to lie there," she whispers, broken yet venomous. "No right at all."

No right to live and breathe where Joseph gasped and died, no right to watch her as she pours out her soul onto these pages when it should be Joseph that does the same.

Robert says nothing. Does nothing. It pleases him to think that he makes her ill at ease with a mere look in her direction. He figures it well deserved for the judgements she has bestowed upon him without even hearing him speak. She called him spoiled. Useless. She pondered whether or not he was a whore until Eric told her to hold her tongue, to refrain from allowing her grief to affect her very spirit.

Robert has known women like this before, so proud, so bold, so unwilling to look past his cursed face, a face so like his father's.

He takes a breath and holds it. He fights to remain neutral when his instinct is to snap back, to humiliate her as she attempts to humiliate him.

"You'd better sleep," she tells him, her voice laced and punctuated by a bitter, warning tone. "Work begins at half past four. Joseph used to tend the animals before sunrise. I take it you'll be doing the same?"

The rise in intonation indicates a question. Again, the young man says nothing. Eric had pondered his mental capacity and wondered if their Lord had brought home a halfwit to play with only to be told he holds his tongue by choice, it seems, not necessity.

Allison wonders whether he is no more than a feral animal captured and contained and it causes her stomach to clench in sympathy for a moment, just a moment and then it's gone.

She remembers that mark on his face only when he slips further into shadow.

"You hide," she says. "Show yourself."

He doesn't move. Allison holds the candle up closer to his face in abject curiosity wondering if the flame will cause him to flinch.

"I see you were no stranger to punishment," she says as she looks more closely at the mark beneath his eye. The skin is broken. Beneath the opening is a livid pattern of yellow and black and blue. Perhaps his master struck him dumb with a beating, a belt to his skin to drive out the devil's influence.

Perhaps it was well deserved, perhaps not.

"Lord James is a gentle man but Lord Gregory does not suffer disobedient fools."

She looks down at his hands and only now does she see the marks of defence, the knuckles tight and bruised. The indication is that he did not know his place; that he raised his hands in self protection and perhaps even made his mark.

Instinctively, she reaches out to inspect the wounds. She doesn't know of Lord Rowan's attitude toward the boy, how he had been frustrated to the point of violence with his servant and son's belligerence, his tendency to run away, the unwillingness to speak his name.

A last straw the previous week, Robert had finally hit back.

"Did you meet flesh and bone?" the woman asks. "Did you fall under the spell of violence and disobedience? Shame on you."

Shame? Shame, she says?

In what is his first show of life and free will at all he angrily pulls away, turning onto his side to face the wall and to escape the scrutiny he perhaps invited. There was a moment, though, a tiny little glimpse of pain from the man that hides inside.

It stung a little.

It's ironic, in a way, that it is Allison who feels the burn of the wax; the heat of the candle as it drips down her fingers.

She should know not to play with fire.


End file.
